Humanity Celebrates With Us / Mockba 1987

On November 7th 1987 – while RAI 1 (first public channel in Italy) broadcasted from Moscow the military parade celebrating 70th anniversary of october revolution – anonymous viewer recorded everything on VHS.

Content inside the tape:

Parade of the 70th anniversary from October Revolution in the Red square in Moscow + audio comment by italian journalists Enrico Mentana and Demetrio Volcic [ 00:00:00 > 00:50:00 ].

Analyzing this found tape I realized how the perception of this event was conditioned by the western point of view – despite the images were probably recorded by a soviet broadcast – and how these images looks like they were filmed by a spy or a voyeur.

Then I recognized at least three different layers of reading:

The Historical event himself, recorded on tape (the anniversary of the October Revolution, a military parade by a regime next to disappear), shootings, framings, visual codes.

The portrayed Historical event, the Red Army victories, the socialist mythologies.

The western (italian) point of view at the time deduced from the italian journalists speech (the Joseph Roth comment on a 1926 parade, reported by italian journalist E. Mentana). The perception of the “other” and the “enemy” in the words of the journalists.

I started moving (peeping) inside these photograms and I tried to focus on people eyes, gestures, movements of public figures and common people, like they were traces of a disappeared world.